Matt Wong: "Nobody wants to work with us because of our growth."

An election candidates meeting on Wednesday evening organised by the Kelvin Peninsula Community Association had no trouble reaching consensus on one point - growth can be a real pain. The meeting was for the QLDC Queenstown-Wakatipu Ward candidates and the two local ORC candidates.

In fact current QLDC councillor Matt Wong put it very succinctly when talking about the contentious issue of how to handle spiralling water costs. “Unlike other councils we don’t have a partner to share costs with. Nobody wants to work with us because of our growth.”

And that set the tone for the whole evening.

New council candidate, local lawyer Stephen Brent, when asked if he would support a halt on development while we sorted out infrastructure, was quite clear that he thought it was not possible to stop housing development or control demand - but then he very quickly changed the subject to the challenge he saw in finding suitable directors for a new water CCO (council controlled organisation).

• Stephen Brent - “we can’t stop housing development.”

But former mayoral candidate and current councillor candidate Jon Mitchell was quite keen to at least put some limits on growth. “The government keeps pushing us towards unlimited growth when most residents don’t support that. One thing we could do is stop expanding the airport and take bigger dividends from the existing level of operations.”

• Jon Mitchell - “stop expanding Queenstown airport and take more dividends.”

Existing councillor Gavin Bartlett came under quite a bit of pressure as chair of the QLDC’s infrastructure committee to explain why growth was being allowed to happen so quickly when infrastructure can’t keep up.

His comment: “I’d rather have seen $250 million spent on the Southern Corridor, including cycle connections, than a signalised intersection (the BP roundabout).”

He then was asked why the council was so committed to having a single, networked sewage system instead of a number of smaller community plants. Jon Mitchell made the point that the risk of an Alpine Fault quake made such a large single network very vulnerable to failure.

Gavin Bartlett’s reply was that the council needed overall control of water networks and gave this as reason why the QLDC had not so far accepted an offer of funding from one of the Southern Corridor developers RCL.

• There was a focused and attentive audience at the Queenstown Golf Club

Jon Mitchell then pointed out that there was an international movement towards smaller community sewage plants that were more resilient. He called for the council to be more open minded about how solutions were determined.

All of the QLDC candidates agreed that they were against the selling of shares in Queenstown airport to raise money for infrastructure.

Hovering at the back of the golf club venue was mayor Glyn Lewers and his social media videographer. He had no official role in the evening but did chip in at one stage to say that the Government was going to force water metering on all councils in the next couple of years.

• Mayor Glyn Lewers - hovered at the back of the room, but he did share that water metering would be with us in the near future to help pay for water costs.

The two ORC Dunstan Ward candidates, Matt Hollyer and Ben Farrell, repeated their request to the electorate to be very careful in voting this year as the Regional Council system had changed. Unlike the QLDC elections, where a tick in the box is required against a specified number of candidates, the ORC system involves ranking candidates using numbers - but voters do not need to put a number next to every candidate.

So Hollyer and Farrell want Queenstown residents to just vote for them as 1 and 2 - but leave the rest of the names unranked and blank. That way they say Queenstown has the best chance of getting direct representation around the ORC table in Dunedin. Ben Farrell added, “this town’s never been properly heard by Wellington.”

Both praised the contribution of outgoing ORC councillor Alexa Forbes who is not standing again but helped moderate the candidate meeting.

There was a lot of discussion around the well-publicised QLDC trust issues and how the relationship between councillors, the mayor and the CEO could be best managed.

New candidate Aaron Cowie called for the CEO employment contract to be shortened from five years to a “rolling six months or a year.”

Jon Mitchell called for more tolerance and inclusivity so that “people with differing views don’t get shut down.”

“The council should work as a team” he added. “We need a change of mayor to achieve that.”